The Folded Man (19 page)

Brian slips, slides, tries to get up and in his chair. A sorry creature whose dignity comes with sitting down. That awful fishy smell on all fronts – the black liquid getting soaked into the walls.

They blast his hands off the wood; aim for his eyes and crotch.

They go for his mouth, his nose.

Choking, choking, suffocating pressure.

Till his lungs are breaking, groaning –

And he has to breathe, take in the water. The water flashes across his lungs. It burns and tears and ruptures.

But he does not cough or drown or move.

He sits there. And he takes it. He breathes. He breathes the water they turn over his smashed body.

Eventually the water runs clear – the cell's back wall turned a uniform grey. And the pigs stop laughing, get bored, don't realise. So they slap him raw for ten minutes instead. A good cuffing round the earholes for their troubles. The nasty sting of hands striking wet skin.

Brian's heavy and sodden. He's cold and wheezing. But he could breathe –

He points at the hose, holding his tiger-striped face. Do it again, he says, laughing. Go on, you bloody animals. Do it with more salt.

 

The coppers drag Brian through and set him up for a grilling. Same two council men, in the interview room, with the same old questions:

Who are you working for? What's your ideology? What's in that box? We'll do a lie detector test.

And get the exact same answers:

Nobody. I don't have one. I don't know. I've nothing to lie about.

All the very same – the ash tray and a pint; the fag he can't smoke because he can't even think of it.

Go back to bed, they tell him. Brian holding his face, the smell of tar all around. And they rewind their tablet, play back the words, laugh, and scrub them forever.

 

Anyway, Brian sleeps through this time. His body aches too much to notice what happens with the lights out and the battles outside.

When he wakes up, it's to a dreadful pain in his armpits. His first reaction is to rub them, but it hurts too much – sharp and sore, like a spot caught under the skin. Instead, he pushes his hands up his jumper and fingers his armpits, gently, a lightness you might find ticklish. He finds the skin has gone baggy and loose. It jolts him upright. It's a new horror. He wipes his face on wet wool.

Panicking, he fingers the lines, these new contours. He pushes fingers along the fleshy channels – still very sore if he presses too hard. Warm grooves cut out of his body.

He clutches his fused thighs. Where the lateral contact between each limb is at its most seamless. It feels harder than usual. He wants to be sick and nearly is. He lifts the blankets. The light touch here now. And the skin's definitely turned harder. There's a sort of carapace around the withered muscle. No, he whispers. No . . .

He lifts the blanket, forces himself to look. In this light, the skin's the colour of scab; it's turned crusty and weeping where his knee joint has bent. Writhing now, as though it burns, Brian begins to sweat – the tuna smell coming from every pore of his body. His own self has turned alien, turned abject. He's half a man with not much left at all.

He has transformed. He's transforming –

Pinch yourself, he thinks. Just pinch yourself.

But it's simple fascination with horror, this time. Because he's found lesions in his armpits. Neat, open lines, working across his skin. And there are hard, golden-brown scales and scabs spread across these malformed limbs.

Gills and scales, he thinks, remembering his myths. Meat.

It's
the box.

He shakes his head.

What happened to
Noah, those wings on the floor.

He strokes his fresh armour –

The edges of the scabs. The give in his skin.

It's how you see yourself. Your hard-wiring,
blown up into sight.

These lesions that yawn and ripple.

Your hopes and fears; your darkness and dreams.

Fresh lungs and holes and ways to breathe.

The box is a
mirror.

That worm in the apple has been drawn with
my bite.

 

Last chance saloon, the coppers tell Brian, squatting over the pitted floor. Brian is leaning on his wooden chair, drawing laboured breaths, the chair vibrating on account of his shivers.

They've brought a holdall bag. One of them is tossing and catching a corkie cricket ball.

In these end-times, they tell him, it's dead common for the fearful to turn to the King of Kings. You'll know about that, won't you? Man of your type. Still. Peculiar how the Lord God our Saviour has become a best pal to all these up and down these cells. Oh aye, we've heard all that as well. On the streets, they want something to cling to. Death in your face puts a new spin on your faith. So are you going to repent?

For what? Brian says. Brian means.

Make yourself feel better, won't it.

You don't even know what you want from me.

They put the bag down. They have an ashtray and a checker-board rag.

Lady Law says we get to keep you. And yeah, we have an idea.

What?

We've got Wilber friends who'll put you to better use, even if we can't glean a bit of intelligence out of your fat skull.

They hold him down. They pull out clothes. Cricket whites, of all things.

Thought we'd play a great British sport today, they say. Or is it your bunch, your skin-heads, who call these garrison games? Distractions from the truth. Pursuits that mask the pursuits of others.

I don't –

They grab Brian's face. Let's get you changed for a nice game of cricket.

They wipe ash all over his face so his face is black. S'get you nice and ready.

And they wheel him outside. Down the cells, the corridor of doors.

 

The varnished floor doesn't take any speed from the ball. It skips, just like a flat stone spun fast over a calm lake, and smashes into the wall next to Brian. The tiles spray grey dust.

Prisoners are screaming, cheering, rattling their cages.

Brian watches the ball roll back along the corridor. His hands are bound tight behind his back, his head tilted forward to save his face. It would be easier not to watch – but every time PC Plod goes to bowl, his pal rallies him for the shot.

Ooh! he goes, like it's a real match.

So the varnished floor doesn't take any speed from the ball. This time, it skips short, and bounces hard. This time, it takes Brian in the gut, and folds him over.

LB! shouts the bowler.

His friend, PC Plod, raises his finger.

A fine wicket, he says.

The noise starts to rouse more prisoners, most of whom can't see what's happening. More start yelling and banging on their doors – come the revolution, that kind of rubbish. Probably thinking the lads outside have gotten themselves in.

Then another ball, the third of this over. Deliberate and slow, so Brian can see where it's going to end up. It arcs in from a springy left hand, the seam a perfect horizontal. When it connects, it edges his throat – and Brian screams, chokes, struggling against the ropes.

Ooh, says PC Plod; the prisoners like a crowd commiserating a near-miss.

This is how you make them feel, PC Plod says. This is why they're rioting on your doorstep.

Brian coughs, coughs and spits on the floor.

You've got me so wrong.

No point being a nationalist no more, says PC Plod.

But I'm not a frigging nationalist, whispers Brian.

They bowl another.

I'm not a racist.

Another at him – the crack of his nose, this time. The blood up his face.

He comes at them. He uses his mushed-together feet to pull himself down the corridor –

Blood and tears and snot and salt; muck and black and spit and ash.

They bowl fast and low. An over. His forehead catches one –

Got your own bud-bud-ding-ding bruise now! shouts PC Plod.

Coming and going, swaying and rocking.

He's coming to get us! they shout.

Just kill me, says Brian, over the racket, rolling towards them using his smashed feet as leverage. Just do me in.

And they see that his tears are coming out black.

 

One of the policemen headlocks Brian – drags him on his toes and through to the interview room. The other plonks himself in Brian's wooden chair, mocking his movement, rattling and rolling in behind. And into the borderless space, where time stops and props come out and torment starts, they haul Brian up and dump him in the chair; throw a balled fist at his eyebrow for their trouble.

Stay still, says one.

Won't bail out of this round, says the other.

I don't know what you're looking for, Brian tries to say – his voice cracked now, his face grubby with ashtray foundation, streaked with dark tears.

A bit of no-strings fun.

In the two-way – the mirror hiding ghosts from another room – he catches his own gaze; the sallow cheeks and the cruel lines. Twin voids set in a haunted face; two white marbles set in a weather-worn tombstone.

See, half the buggers in here haven't seen the sun in months, Brian. They stopped screaming a long time back. We'd like to help you help yourself. We'd just like you to co-operate. Give us names, addresses. Because –

The copper has stopped. He asks the other: Did you hear that?

What?

Were that you? Knocking on the table?

Was it heck.

Brian shifts, fidgets.

The man starts again.

Where were we? Go on. What you got for us?

Brian snaps. Brian has a brainwave. Brian says: Person you want to go after lives out near Flouch roundabout. Ian. He's got lads down here – he's got heads on their way. Wants to pull some kind of coup – he's one of these Anglo-Saxon heritage lot. Total nutter. Totally insane. And he's got you –

Hang about, one of the coppers says, his hand up. Took me a while to work out where you were talking. Flouch roundabout? That's on the way to Sheffield lad. We haven't worked with West Yorkshire lot since the last riots. So let's maybe talk about people closer to home.

Brian shakes his head.

You don't understand, he says.

One of the coppers slams a fist to the table.

You
don't understand. West Yorkshire isn't our scene. Isn't owt to do with any of us. How many Anglo-Saxon fans you think we see every week in this place? Crawl out their rocks, in their white masks, to cause a fuss over some lad or another. How many d'you think we've had sat there, and tell us about this nigger or this paki, this wog or this chink? How many d'you think we've handcuffed trying to string up some poor lad from a lamp post? We've seen it all pal. And I reckon by now you've realised we deal with all of you the same. No discrimination. No fucking mercy. Off to the Wilbers with half, the bin for the rest.

But he's taken my house –

The copper holds up a piece of paper.

Says here you're staying at a shoe shop in Ancoats.

I – I don't know.

Tell us something you do, then.

I don't –

He your boss, this Ian? Are you a grass, Meredith?

No, I'm –

This time, all three of them hear the raps – four sharp bangs from the hidden side of the two-way.

One copper stands up and scans his lot. If you looked closer, you'd see the hairs of his arm on their ends.

Who's in there? he says. At this bloody time?

Not a clue, the other says, his watch held up to his face in bafflement.

The standing copper puts his ear to the glass. Cups it nice and tight.

Three, sharp raps on the two-way glass.

The copper pulls off and falls back.

Bloody hell –

The copper tries the door. The door won't shift. The copper's hands are shaking.

The other copper stands up fast. Brian sways; eyes forward, thinking on the other side, of what can see all three.

A single, loud bang rattles the fixings.

The coppers together put their eyes to the glass.

Another. The coppers back away, swallowing hard. One of them slaps on the intercom, yells desperately at the radio fuzz.

The glass begins to sing. It vibrates in a low note. It hums, peals, and finally it splits. Small lines crawl out from a single point in its centre, cracks sluicing from the middle to its edges. The panel sags from the middle, its falling weight bringing the top foot or so with it. Brian recoils, shuts his eyes.

And PC Plod, times two, they're both on the floor.

Brian bends back, as far as this wooden spine will let him; the open welt searing hot, a pulse in his back, a ­network of pain lighting up with bruises for nodes.

The kind of screaming you don't forget. An over­powering smell – sweet, sticky, fecal. Brian recognises it as decay; dying cells and yellow fluids –

A stormcloud of flies comes through the hole and cycles the room. Bluebottles and sandflies and midges and horse flies, their buzzing in all frequencies, their legs on every surface.

In that day
the Lord will whistle for flies
, Brian thinks. Brian hears his mother say.

But nothing science or God could explain is beyond the smashed glass.

Before them, a near-naked creature cast in moon-white and gleaming – a twisted thing, its musculature worn inside-out, writhing skin torn over tubes of tendon, the skin flayed on its trunk, the skin stretched out across two-metre wings. And it shines, slick – gleaming wet with a kind of jelly. Hissing through the nose; the eyes forward.

In jerks, spasms, the creature comes at the interview room, grey powder loosed from the wings, shaken into thick air. These wings, heavy with this strange dust, crawl their way across the partition with the twitches of a wasp's antennae. Fully out, they stretch eight feet wall-to-wall. Pirate sails that hide the barren room behind.